Crosswords Preview: Brings Real World to the Digital Space

PuzzleSocial has announced the beta launch of Crosswords on Facebook. According to the developer, this is the "first social, competitive, multi-player crosswords application for Facebook." In it, you'll be able to play a variety of daily crossword puzzles, that are other wise only available in newspapers or less convenient (or at least less social) online outlets.

By Brandy Shaul From games.com

The real-world crosswords come in the form of the Newsday Crossword, a daily crossword puzzle featured in hundreds of magazines and online, the CrosSynergy Crossword printed daily in the Washington Post and the A.V. Club Crossword, featured in the Onion A.V. Club. In addition, this Facebook game received an exclusive daily puzzle: the Celebrity Crossword, which features puzzles created by some of the industry's most famous "constructors" (those people that actually write, or construct the puzzles).

You'll have a variety of options when beginning a puzzle. You can play by yourself against a clock with stat tracking (and no ability to check your wrong answers), or can play casually without a timer and with red letters when you're wrong. You can take on a real-time opponent head-to-head, play with multiple players in doubles tournaments (your partner could be anyone in the world), or participate in the standard singles tournaments.

Will Crosswords on Facebook appeal to the mass audience? That remains to be seen, but from our hands-on time with the game, we can confirm that the interface works well, with keyboard entry allowing you to simply hit Tab to move from clue to clue. There are plenty of options to tweak each game to your liking (you can force the game to skip letter already entered with typing in the opposite direction, give the space bar a function and more), and leaderboards allowing you to compare your own stats with those of both friends and strangers alike.

If you have even a passing interest in crossword puzzles in general, why not give Crosswords on Facebook a shot?